The Associate by Phillip Margolin

know that he was dead before he was set on fire,” the ME said. “There was still some blood in his heart. It was deep purple instead of red or pink, so I guessed that carbon monoxide was not present. The test confirmed my guess. If he was alive when he burned I would have found carbon monoxide in his blood.
    “His airways were also free of soot, which he would have breathed in if he was breathing when the fire started.”
    Dr. Grace bent over the corpse. “See these marks?” she asked, pointing to several notches that scarred one of the ribs. “They were made by a knife. The rib is in close proximity to the heart. Luckily, he was lying on a concrete floor, so his front was protected to a certain degree and the heart was preserved. It showed stab wounds and there was blood in the left chest and pericardial sac, which you’d expect with a stabbing.”
    “What about the skull? The monkey was shot. It looks like Doe’s skull was blown out the same way,” Billie said.
    “Come over here,” Dr. Grace said as she led the group over to a table covered by a white sheet that stood in front of a stainless-steel counter and sink. On the sheet were the fragments of Doe’s skull that had been gathered at the crime scene. They had been painstakingly pieced together.
    “Gunshots cause linear fractures that radiate out from the hole caused by the exit or entrance of the bullet. We didn’t find linear fractures and you can see that there’s no hole formed by the skull fragments.
    “If the skull had been fractured by blunt force trauma from a club or baseball bat or something like that, we would have found sections of bone showing a depression from the blow.”
    “So what’s the explanation?” Billie asked.
    “The brain is blood-intensive. When the fire heated the blood it generated steam that blew out the back of John Doe’s skull.”
    The detective grimaced.
    “Was he stabbed to death at the lab?” Kate asked.
    “I can’t tell you that. We did find some fibers that were crushed into the fabric of his clothing and survived the fire. I’m having the lab test them. If they’re the type of fibers you find in a car trunk, we can guess that he was transported to the lab, but that would only be a guess.”
    “What about time of death?” Billie asked. “Can you tell how many days he’s been dead?”
    “I can’t do much for you there.” Dr. Grace pointed to a sieve resting in a metal pot on one of the autopsy tables. “That’s his last meal,” she said, indicating pieces of steak, baked potato skin, lettuce, and tomato. “He was killed within an hour of eating, but how long ago I can’t say.”
    Billie turned to Jack Forester. “Can you tell me enough about him for me to match him with a missing person report?”
    “Well, we’ve got the teeth, of course. The guy has had dental work done. Brubaker’s out of town,” Forester said, referring to Dr. Harry Brubaker, the forensic dentist who was normally present at autopsies. “We’ll get these over to him when he comes back from vacation. But he won’t be much help until we have someone to whom he can match the dental work.”
    “Can you tell anything from the teeth?” asked Kate, who had read a few books in Forester’s field.
    “They do give us some idea of Doe’s age,” he answered. “We know a person is eighteen or younger if his wisdom teeth have not erupted, so this guy is definitely over eighteen. The degeneration of the skeleton also helps us with his age. Now this is very subjective, but the changes in this guy’s spine tell me that he’s probably older than thirty.
    “The last thing I did was check out the configuration of the pelvis. Where the two halves of the pelvis meet in front is called the pubic symphysis and it wears with age. A guy named T. Wingate Todd made casts of the pelvis of a wide range of corpses whose ages were known. He found that the wear pattern on the pelvis is pretty consistent at different ages.”
    Forester pointed